Free Music Friday - Two Tracks by Kirk Pearson

Today's we're kicking off a new feature on MetroMusicScene - Free Music Friday. The music comes courtesy of the Free Music Archive (FMA), an interactive library of music organized by freeform radio station WFMU.

Inspired by the free and open source software (FOSS) movement and the Creative Commons public copyright license, the FMA provides a framework to connect musicians, artists, and curators via legally shared music. High-quality MP3 downloads are freely available. Customers can tip or donate to their favorite artists, or purchase lossless downloads of music via the artists' personal websites.

Our inaugural Free Music Friday features a pair of tracks by Kirk Pearson, a New York musician and composer studying at Oberlin. The first piece, 'A Man Who Went Missing', is a collaboration with Julian Korzeniowsky. Pearson and Korzeniowsky met as students at the New York's famed LaGuardia High School. The song is part of an EP that serves as a musical examination of the mystery behind the disappearance of Louis Le Prince, the French inventor who recorded the first moving picture. Le Prince disappeared from his compartment on a train bound for Paris on September 16, 1890, becoming little more than a footnote in the history of motion pictures.

The second track, 'To Kairo', was written and performed with the digital musical collaborative BIT. The song is from an album that explores an alternate history of how the 20th century might have turned out differently had a handful of failed projects had succeeded. 'To Kairo' wonders how different Africa might be had Cecil Rhodes' Cape to Cairo Railway had been completed.

Free Music Friday will be a recurring feature on MetroMusicScene. We encourage you to take a look around the FMA, and please support the artists whose work you download.

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